Comment Ratings

Have installed (thanks to Inspire) a new plugin. You can vote a rating up or down, as before. But there are now some consequences to it.

Comments with lots of positive ratings get highlighted. I have set the threshold for now to 5. I may need to raise it. I don’t want too many highlighted – just those which get lots of people saying this is great.

Comments with lots of negative ratings gets hidden – you can still read them if you want by clicking on them, but it allows you to skip over them. Now I have set the threshold at 10 negative comments, as I don’t want lots of comments hidden. I will increase this if people are voting comments down just because they may not agree with a comment, as opposed to it being a comment of poor quality. There is a huge difference.

Ideally I want a plugin where each reader could choose their own thresholds, but the one time I tried that it crashed the system as 500,000 comments and 5,000 users is too much for it. We’ll see how this goes. Remember nothing is blocked – it is just requires a click to view.

Also comments with lost of both positive and negative ratings also get highlighted as a hot debate comment. The threshold is a total of 12 votes (both positive and negative). Again I’ll revise this an necessary.

Also the sidebar now displays not just the most recent comments, but the more highly ranked ones.

malcolm

It’s rubbish.

The bold and background colours are horrible to view and we could infer all that stuff anyway by simply looking at the +/- counts (particularly when they were at the top of the comment, rather than the bottom).

And it’s clunky. Often the comments with lots of negative karma are the most interesting. If you want to ignore a poster than you can just used Firefox and get the RIP add-on. Much cleaner.

A native RIP feature would be good. Click to ignore that poster from that point on. They could even have a % showing how many people were not ignoring their comments.

I don’t like the idea of having to click to read individual posts. It’s the kind of thing that keeps me away from other messageboards. All you need is a voluntary ignore function for users, rather than posts.

Jeff83

Yesterday one of my posts had something like [+13, -10] at the time I looked at it. What would happen in that case?

I wanted to say it would go to civil war with itself and combust but..

Also comments with lost of both positive and negative ratings also get highlighted as a hot debate comment. The threshold is a total of 12 votes (both positive and negative). Again I’ll revise this an necessary.

Fletch

ps, not to be rude or anything and I know you probably need the income from them – but the ads on here (scoop, adsfac, adserver, google) are really slowing down my experience on here. I must admit I am blocking them with a Firefox plugin, but it seems like they still load in the background, seen or not, and the forum won’t display until they are loaded (takes 30 seconds each time I load a page over my dialup before I can see anything – I can’t get broadband here).

Ross Nixon

Repton

The bold and background colours are horrible to view and we could infer all that stuff anyway by simply looking at the +/- counts (particularly when they were at the top of the comment, rather than the bottom).

Agreed.

If anyone out there is still using greasemonkey, I have modified my script to disable the background colours, making it look the way it used to.

[hmm, I wonder if I could move the vote buttons back to the top as well..]

RRM

DPF: have set the threshold at 10 negative comments, as I don’t want lots of comments hidden. I will increase this if people are voting comments down just because they may not agree with a comment, as opposed to it being a comment of poor quality. There is a huge difference. /Quote

Yeah good luck with that.
Your hounds cannot abide dissent, and they vote it down hugely wherever they see it.

Get ready for your comments pages to become an unfettered right-wing circle jerk – reminiscent of a mirror image of The Standard. Is that what you want?

RRM

New home page sidebar of recent comments is an improvement.

The text by the karma buttons is just clutter, e.g. “Hot debate. What do you think?”, “Like or Dislike”, “Well-loved” etc. tyou should get rid of those. The highlighting and the karma buttons speak for themselves.

If a post is receiving a lot of likes and dislikes, I can make my own judgment as to whether it is of value to click the post to see the text. I don’t need the plugin to decide for me.

If a post has received a lot of dislikes, then presumably there is a reason for it. In my view it’s often because these posts add noise, rather than information to the debate. I’m happy to see attempts to inflate the noise levels hindered, rather than being let back in under a ‘hot debate’ rubric.

i.e. the first paragraph of a highlighted post is not inside a <p> element, and thus it doesn’t get the styling that <p> elements get (which is: normal font-weight, extra space between lines, 12pt text).

side show bob

I feel sorry for phool, it’s not his fault he was born a noddy, life isn’t fair despite what the good little socialist would have you to believe. I would not rip old phool or anyone else. I believe in free speech an assume most here do also. 99.9% of the time we probably disagree with him but how can we level criticisms of others when they try to such down debate ( remember Liarbore and no comment in election year ) and seek to do the same to others. We may not like the message but if we stifle this message we are no better then the people who would silence us.

petal

Rex Widerstrom

I will increase this if people are voting comments down just because they may not agree with a comment, as opposed to it being a comment of poor quality.

I have often wondered about that. Clearly most people are using the karma system as an agree/disagree measure rather than as a rating of quality. And calling it “like / dislike” is reinforcing that.

I give people with whom I disagree positive karma for a well thought out and/or well written response. But I see some quite well-composed comments — though expressing opinions unlikely to be agreed to by the majority of commenters here — get hammered with negative karma.

I want to read quality comments, not ones I necessarily agree with. But given that the karma system seems to amount to “Oh look philu / Redbaiter / RRM / someone else I viscerally dislike has said something. Time to hit the negative karma”, I have to ask if there’s even a point?

If I wanted to watch rubes form opinions based on personal prejudice, I’d sit in the audience for “Dancing with the Stars” 😀

The text by the karma buttons is just clutter, e.g. “Hot debate. What do you think?”, “Like or Dislike”, “Well-loved” etc. tyou should get rid of those. The highlighting and the karma buttons speak for themselves.

I agree that the two karma buttons are sufficient without the additional comments.
Also, I agree with others that karma buttons at the top are better.

One gripe I have is that when you open an older topic up (say 2+ days ago) all of the karma scores have reset themselves to ‘zero’. Is there anyway to retain these as these were quite helpful when reviewing older topics, especially identifying ‘high value’ comments.

malcolm

I give people with whom I disagree positive karma for a well thought out and/or well written response. But I see some quite well-composed comments — though expressing opinions unlikely to be agreed to by the majority of commenters here — get hammered with negative karma.

I agree. Good luck trying to get people to use karma in such an open-minded way.

I agree. Good luck trying to get people to use karma in such an open-minded way.

I think this inflates the problem. While some people do have a ‘reflex’ action towards some posters, there are certainly occasions where ‘minority viewpoints’ do get a mix of karma, with readers weighing in with positive responses. As it stands, it is actually difficult to routinely get 10 negative ‘thumbs’, even with the reflex responses (excpetions to be made for Phool).

I try to read posts carefully where they do make a cogent argument, and respond where I have the time. I’m more likely to assign negative karma to posts that are thick with ideological declarations, where the poster is signaling a complete unwillingness to consider any variation in viewpoint.

Andrew W

RightNow

The highlights make it seem like you’ve downloaded a ‘pimp your page’ plug-in. Basically the text is less readable in my opinion. Also as funny as it is that some people are bound to have their posts hidden, I think it is a bit like censorship (yes I do realise you can still click to read, in the same vein you can google for dissenting opinion on climate science even though it didn’t get published in Nature).

Pete George

Generally I’m getting used to the changes. But like others I think the highlighted text (yellow or pink) is harder to read, which is a shame for the potentially more notable posts. I’m finding I’m almost having to squint at them to read them. Is it possible to highlight them differently eg a colour background just for the header of the post rather than for the body?

Dave Mann

Actually, I think the highlighting of positively rated comments and hiding the poorly rated ones is only going to shut down debate and leave people ‘preaching to the converted’.

But highlighting the hot debates is a great idea. This is where the actual exchange of views comes in. Can you cut out the rest of it and just leave the ‘hot debate’ feature in? Also, put the karma at the top of the comment please?

Pete George

After having a good read through topics this morning I suspect that it may not be sop much the coloured background that is the problem but a lack of top and bottom margin on it – the colour squeezes in on the text too much. If a blank line with colour was added top and bottom I think it would improve the readability quite a lot. A 1 character marginn left and right would also help. OR – colour highlight the whole post including header and footer (karma).

Once I have got used to it the grouping under topic Recent Comments is a good change.

Generally I’m getting used to the changes. But like others I think the highlighted text (yellow or pink) is harder to read, which is a shame for the potentially more notable posts. I’m finding I’m almost having to squint at them to read them. Is it possible to highlight them differently eg a colour background just for the header of the post rather than for the body?

Agree – the yellow background is harder to read.
Would it be possible to just highlight the commentor’s name, or, better yet, just change the colour of the name?
Say ‘Green’ for Well-loved.
‘Red’ for Poorly-rated.
‘Orange’ for Hot debate.

This would leave the main text body unchanged backgroundwise, and thus easier on the eyes.

Dave Mann

tvb

You are dead wrong about hiding the negative ratings. They should be highlighted as much as the positive ones. Though it is much easier to say something stupid and get a big negative rating – depending on who you are.